


Have We Met?

by yourdeadfriend



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Multiple Personalities, Pen Pals
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-01-14
Updated: 2012-06-28
Packaged: 2017-10-29 12:23:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/319853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yourdeadfriend/pseuds/yourdeadfriend
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Character Exploration Alphabet Meme : Marian Hawke is a perfectly normal 22 year old. She has twin siblings, a lovely mum and sweet friends. She meets the most interesting person she's ever met... for the second time. Explores an AU view of Anders' and Hawke's life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A is for Anderfels

If you’re not a Grey Warden, the Anderfels is a bleak place to live. Even then, it barely passes. In the summer and spring - very beautiful if you’re not used to it. In the fall and winter – balls-numbingly, lip-chappingly, risk-frostbite-if-you-go-outside cold. But still quite beautiful.

Everyone who lives in the Anderfels is an Anders. A small dirty blonde child sitting in the third desk in the last row of a chilly classroom looking past the two kids next to him out the window moreso out of boredom than interest is also an Anders. Because he is an Anders, he prefers to be called Anders. It will make things easier, he says, for when he leaves the Anderfels to be a knight and slay dragons. People will know who he is, he says, and where he came from.

Anders is in the fifth grade when his teacher claps her hands to get her students’ attention. She announces that there are people in Ferelden, children just like them. She is friends with a teacher in a village called Lothering, and everyone has been assigned another child to write to. A pen pal project. Anders is paying attention now. They will learn about each other’s culture and customs and most importantly make new friends, relationships that will last a life time. She takes a large manila envelope, thick with papers. This project will last all year. At the end of the year, the children from Lothering will come to the Anderfels and visit.

The kids groan at the year-long project, although all of them are excited.

She calls all of them up, one by one. When Anders goes up to get his, the teacher smiles. I think you’ll like her; she winks and calls the next kid up. Anders frowns, scrunching his nose. Girls are gross. He doesn’t want to write to a girl. She’s only going to want to talk about ponies and baby rabbits.  
All the profiles of their pen pal have pictures paper clipped to them. A girl with short black hair and big blue eyes with her tongue out and her arms crossed looks up at him. In scritchy scratchy handwriting, it reads “Dear Pen Pal, my name is Marian Hawke. I like to play sword fight. I like turtles. I like mud. I have a Mama, a Daddy and a brother and a sister. They’re twins. They always smell bad and they’re really noisy. I don’t think I like them. My Mama is nice and my Daddy is strong. What is your family like? Do you like games? Do you like animals too? I want a mabari. Sincerely, Hawke”. Under her signature, there was a crude drawing of a bird.

Anders supposed this was acceptable, for a girl.

He began his letter with “Right now in the Anderfels, it’s really windy.”

He's the first one to run up to the teacher to have his letter sent out. She says that he needs to have a picture taken, like Marian did. He agrees and poses. He pulls on his ears and blows a raspberry at the camera. His teacher laughs.

His friends tease him for having a girl as a pen pal. They also ask if she's cute. They see the picture and say she looks like a boy, she doesn't count. Anders yells, "Shut up, you don't even know her!" He doesn't know her either.

Anders has a girlfriend, Anders has a girlfriend!

Anders sulks on the swings, being rocked gently by the fall wind.

School lets out and he bustles home. The wind was getting worse and it would soon give way to snow. He tells his mum all about his new pen pal, Hawke. Maybe when she visits, she can stay here. We'll see, his mum smiles and sits him down at the table for hot cocoa. 


	2. B is for Bullies

By now, they know each other’s favourite colour, foods, some of each other’s friends, the music they like. Hawke tells him that he’s her best friend. Anders brags about that to his friends until the next letter comes. 

Before school had let out for the winter holidays, Anders and Hawke had asked each other their plans for the break.

Hawke wanted to build the biggest snowman. She wanted to make it 7 feet tall, a warrior with a sword like the people of Par Vollen she had learnt about in her history lessons. She was impressed with their might and filled with wonder of all of the exotic lands outside of her little Ferelden. 

Anders wanted to do the same thing, but his mother wouldn’t allow him outside for too long, if at all. The snow piles up against the doors; Anders is small and can easily be lost. He tells Hawke that he would be inside, playing games with his parents. He promises he would draw her pictures of her and him, playing in the snow together. They tell each other good bye for the winter. In a couple of weeks, they’ll be friends again.

Anders goes outside on a less vicious day, wrapped up in layers of warm clothing. He runs around and plays within distance of his house, rolls snow around and forms huge balls. He isn’t strong enough to lift or push them on top of one another. He can’t make a huge snowman.

Because he is one of the smallest people in his class, he is constantly picked on by his classmates. It’s just his luck that Aerin and her group of whingey followers, Ritt and Hadler and one or two others. He only really knows who Aerin is. The rest look all the same to him: Big, loud and mean. 

When he sees them walking around, he bites his lip and doesn’t look at them. However, they get closer, they get louder, and he knows that it’ll be unavoidable. They all crowd around him as he pats his snow creation absently, looking for something to occupy himself with. 

“Lookit the ickle bubby playing in the snow,” Aerin sneers, crossing her arms over her heavy coat. Anders can hardly hear her under her loud pink scarf. He tried even harder not to look at her, anyway. It was embarrassing that a girl was bigger than he was. 

One of the others guffaws. “Yeah! Everyone knows that playing in the snow is for babies. Real grown-up people have snowball fights and don’t waste their time making snowmen.”  
“More like a snow lump!” More laughs. They’re getting closer to him and Anders is getting ready to run. “He can’t even do baby stuff right!” A leg swings out and kicks Anders’ snowthing, making it crumble and cave into itself.

“Hey!” Anders shouts indignantly, finally paying them the attention they craved. “That’s not nice! Stop!”

“Stawwwp!” Aerin mocks him in a high pitched, nasally voice, then reverts back to her own. “Maker, you sound pathetic.” She crosses her arms and looks down at him, daring him to stand up for himself.

“All of you are just mean! Go away! Leave me alone!” Anders shouts and stomps. His cheeks were reddening and not just from the cold. A collective, mocking ‘ooooh,’ and Anders is shoved down into the snow. The children grab fistfuls of snow and shove them into his face, the cold stinging him and making everything number than it already was.   
Anders coughs and splutters and thrashes wildly but he’s no match against them. After what feels like forever, they finally leave, laughing.

Anders sits up in the snow for a while, staring at where his snow sculpture once was, hugging his knees. He gets up and walks back to his house, the opposite direction of where those bullies left and sits himself in front of the fireplace, nursing his frozen extremities and his ego until he’s called for supper.

When he's asked what he did today, he tells his parents a grand tale of how four evil skeletons were harassing a young girl with black hair and he bravely stepped in and saved her, wielding a stick and a rock. His parents look at each other and smile, going along with their son's story. 

"Did you get to kiss her?" His father asks with a small smirk on his face. Anders blushes fiercely.

"No, of course not!" He crosses his arms as if he were disgusted with the very idea. On the inside, however, he decided that it wouldn't be such a bad thing if he kissed the black haired girl he saved, Miss Marian Hawke.


End file.
